In Cold, In Light, In Grief

The brightest day there could possibly be, is a cold bright day.

The strongest sun you could ever see, is the sun twinkling down on bright white snow in the bitter cold. It was so beautiful outside that I wanted to go out, but so painfully cold that it hurt.

Finally, I could take it no longer. I bundled into my coat, and stuffed my hands in my pockets, and went out into the sunshine.

The cat went with me. She’d spent the morning begging to go out, and after it got over ten degrees she spent the early afternoon on the porch in her warming box, lying on her back. She bounced out when I came outside. I asked if she wanted to go walking with me as she’d done in the summer, and she began to follow.

Walking with a cat is different than walking a dog. Charlie didn’t want to follow behind me in a straight line. She wanted to stay at a distance, pretending not to follow, and then bolt forward between my legs and almost trip me. No matter how much I wanted to walk fast, she wanted to dawdle and sniff the crystals of rock salt on the sidewalk. Every so often she’d decide to inspect the bottom of a parked car, and I’d wait beside the car until she was finished.  Every time a car moved slowly down the one-way street, she’d arch her back and go hide until it passed. As for me, I was equally mesmerized, stopping to admire icicles and the column of gleaming ice under somebody’s dripping garden hose spout.

Eventually, we found ourselves walking by the Artful Dodgers’ old house.

The dilapidated structure hasn’t been occupied since they fled in June. I don’t know how the bank will ever manage to sell it. It’s falling to pieces. I was horrified that a human being was living there in the first place when they moved in, and they managed to wreck it even further. Now it was empty, covered in snow and ice, between two occupied houses, with a “for sale” sign taped in one window.

The cat trotted up to the porch as if she’d never left.

You may recall that Charlie was once the Artful Dodgers’ cat. They had many cats, all starving. The Sylph would tell me stories about paying thousands of dollars to the pet shop for the strays her mother took in and hoarded. They let Charlie breed four litters with no care for her or the kittens at all. One of her litters all froze to death, and another kitten starved because she was too weak to find a nipple. Charlie first met me when she came to my porch in desperation in the late fall, meowing for food, and I gave her a can of tuna. The children wandered over soon after, swiping pumpkins and tomatoes from my garden, and I pretended not to know they were the thieves because they looked so hungry. I did everything I could to help. I played the role of their surrogate grandmother for about a year, and then they disappeared, as poor children do. Poor children come and go like ghosts. They move from dilapidated house to dilapidated house, from eviction to eviction, from one mentally ill caregiver to another and then to foster care and back, never staying anywhere long enough to feel safe.

“There’s no one there, Charlie,” I told the cat.

She looked quizzically at me.

“They moved away. They’re in another town.”

Charlie stretched forward like the Sphinx and sharpened her front claws on the new outdoor carpeting the realtor had put down over the plywood.  I wondered why they’d bothered to do that. There was no making this house look inhabitable. They hadn’t tried to scrape and replace the peeling outdoor paint. They hadn’t replaced the missing rungs on the railing on the porch. They hadn’t even scraped off the old stickers the children used to decorate the windows. They’d only put a rug over the worn porch floor.

“You can’t go back, Charlie. The house is empty.”

She got up on her hind legs and peeked through the window, to see if the children were coming.

“They’re all gone.”

As I said it, the ice began to melt– not outside, but inside. Inside of me was a cold wad of grief and anxiety, the size and hardness of one of those Easter eggs we’d shared at the rainy day Easter party, lodged at the very bottom of my throat. I’d carried it there since the Dodgers disappeared in June. It hadn’t moved much when I found out they may have gotten to safety. Every emotion I had felt for the next half a year, I had felt around that ball of ice.  Joy, whimsy, excitement, satisfaction and contentment had all existed inside of me from time to time, but only in a thinner or thicker layer around the ice. And now the ice was turning liquid for the first time in seven months, and I was no longer choking but drowning. I was drowning in sadness I hadn’t let myself feel before.

All I want is for the people I love to be happy, and that’s something I can never have.

All I want is for children and their families to be able to be well.

All I want is for humans, and cats, and birds, and everything that lives, to be alive and safe and free, and I would like the same things for myself.

I want you to know that these people exist, and that they are humans like you, and that what they endure isn’t their fault. That they are every bit as beautiful and interesting and important as you are, but they are suffering. That we could build a better world if we wanted, and we must.

I want to stop losing people.

I don’t want to be alone.

“Let’s go home,” I said to the cat. “Come on. Let’s go back and have a snack.”

She hopped off the porch and trotted after me, stopping again and again to hide from moving cars.

I was sad the rest of the day.